Lessons learned

Getting had, getting took, I tell you folks, it's harder than it looks

After four years and £200 million, this week the COVID Inquiry came to an end. The Inquiry came out fighting at the end, with the chair saying:

I hope that when they read about the extent of the suffering that we've heard and see the results of the inquiry's work, they will appreciate the huge scale of loss caused by Covid 19 and they will understand better why this inquiry was established

The Inquiry Secretary wrote a piece in the Guardian saying that:

The families who lost loved ones, the key workers who risked their lives, the people who shielded alone, the communities that sacrificed so much – they all deserve one thing above all else: meaningful change.

Similarly, Rachel Cunliffe in the New Statesman encourages us “Don’t Forget The Harm of COVID”

But this argument overlooks the reality that letting go is only possible if we recognise the harm that was caused. The scars of the Covid pandemic run deep, a rupture in the relationship hundreds of thousands of citizens have with the state that has never fully healed.

And I think all these people are right to some extent, but are missing the point. COVID was bad, I’ve never denied that. But my feeling is that it’s precisely because it was so bad that we deserved a better Inquiry than we got, one with the scientific background to understand the underlying processes which our politicians were forced to react to, and one being prepared to reflect on and acknowledge its own mistakes.

Back in November, I wrote about the Inquiry simply and demonstrably misstating the evidence about lateral flow tests in a document from SAGE. There has been no correction of this point on their site, or any acknowledgement of it.

In the same piece I wrote that the much-reported “23,000 deaths could have been saved by locking down a week earlier” conclusion wasn’t as simple as it sounds, because it ignored the fact that this could have made the second wave exponentially worse. As James Marriott wrote in the Times this week:

Doubt is always a virtue. But never more so than at the moment. The world has grown so strange and so changeable that conviction seems the least apt response. Never has there been a more appropriate time to keep an open mind.

But don’t just take my word for it.

The Office for Statistics Regulation, the official body tasked with ensuring that data and numbers are reported accurately by Government organisations, wrote to the Inquiry on 19th February about this 23,000 deaths figure. First, as in my November post, they pointed out the degree of uncertainty about the number, a point grudgingly acknowledged by the Inquiry Secretary in his response.

But secondly, and more importantly, the OSR pointed out that the model which made these claims didn’t just assume that we’d have locked down a week earlier. It assumed that all of the measures would have occurred a week earlier, and achieved the same amount of public adherence.

So when Boris Johnson spoke on 16th March 2020 and announced that

now is the time for everyone to stop non-essential contact with others and to stop all unnecessary travel. We need people to start working from home where they possibly can. And you should avoid pubs, clubs, theatres and other such social venues

we need to imagine a counterfactual where he did this on the 9th March, and that as many people stuck to it. On that day, there were a total of 46 new cases announced, taking us to 319. The UK’s fourth death from the virus had just occurred. Of course, we know that the snowball was rolling down the hill and starting to form into an avalanche, but it’s not clear that the public and politicians understood that then.

Even the transformative Imperial Report 9, with its clear explanations of growth scenarios and how the NHS could be overwhelmed, wasn’t published until the 16th. For the Inquiry simply to accept the premise that without Report 9 it would have been reasonable, proportionate and politically feasible for the Government to request national stay-at-home measures on the same day as Italy (the European canary in the coalmine) seems quite a stretch to me.

And not just me. I think it’s fair to say that David Spiegelhalter, legend of communicating statistics to the public, former Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, is similarly unconvinced.

If there’s a fight about the presentation of data, and the Office for Statistics Regulation and Professor Spiegelhalter are on the same team, then I’m pretty comfortable arguing in the same direction. For the Inquiry and the media to try to present criticisms of the Inquiry as just coming from the disgruntled right wing, from the Taxpayers Alliance and from COVID deniers, seems to me to be missing the point.

As we come up to tomorrow’s five year anniversary of the reopening of schools, and the Telegraph’s piece about “Team Super Spreaders” versus “Team Openers”, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether all the COVID measures taken were proportionate and effective. Many of the horrific stories about people not being able to say goodbye to their loved ones are presented as an inevitable impact of the virus, rather than a political choice that was made. Was it really the case that stopping children meeting up outside had any measurable effect on the progression of the virus?

In my view, to simply point at the horrific death toll and thereby imply that anything that we did was justified as a result, does the victims and their families (as well as everyone who lived through lockdown measures) an enormous disservice. Like I say, the COVID Inquiry feels like a missed chance to ask some of the questions that we should have asked at the time, and that’s why I find it frustrating.